I wasn't talking about the political machine in Boston. I'm not sure who they are and I really can't speak about them.
What I do know is that Cardinal Law called Catholic judges, politicians and media people and leaned on them VERY heavily to cover up any mention of the scandal and to try to derail any investigations.
He repeatedly told them, in person and in telephone calls, that because they were Catholic they had to help with the cover up.
Yes, most of them were Democrats but they were shocked that a religious person not only knew what was going on but was allowing it to continue.
Cardinal Law had tremendous political aspirations. He wanted to be the first Harvard pope. Won't happen now.
I know Cardinal Law personally; have known him for 35 years when he was Chancellor of the Diocese of Jackson MS. He, in fact, was instrumental in ridding the Diocese of a couple of abusers while he was there. I can't see him all of a sudden deciding that the Church should avoid scandal, when he'd already handled the cases in MS.
He admitted that he was too soft on the priests; he was approaching things from his role as Bishop, which he believed was supposed to be Pastoral. I guess he assumed that since they'd been returned from their counseling, they were ready to be returned to service. He assumed wrong, and accepted the blame for that.
I'm not going to defend all of his actions, he clearly made some HUGE mistakes, and took responsibility for them. I'm just saying that HE wasn't the cause for the problems in Boston, even though the Boston Globe blamed him for all of it. The Attorney General for the Commonwealth stated that nothing the Cardinal had done was legally actionable, though the man actually said publicly that he wished he could find something to put the Cardinal in jail for. Sounds like a vendetta to me. I truly believe that he, in collusion with the Boston Globe, was actively trying to diminish the reputation of the Church in advance of the push for homosexual marriage in the Commonwealth, so that supporters of the push could claim that because of the abuse scandal, the Church had no legitimacy in opposing it. In fact the Globe editorialized just that when the subject of homosexual marriage arose. The timing was NOT coincidental.